The Furka starts at Gletsch, in the hollow where the Rhône begins, and climbs the wall above it in full view of the glacier that feeds the river. Halfway up, the Hotel Belvédère sits on the outside of a hairpin with nothing behind it but ice — the most photographed building on any Swiss pass, and the stretch of road used for the chase sequence in Goldfinger in 1964.
The climb itself is short by Alpine standards: ten kilometres and 668 metres of climbing. The first six are steady and unremarkable. Kilometres seven, eight and nine are the climb — 9.2, 8.4 and 8.2 per cent, taken above 2,000 metres with the valley falling away on the right — and then the gradient collapses to almost nothing for the last kilometre onto the col at 2,428 metres.
It is a climb that rewards riding hard rather than riding carefully, which is a different demand on a frame than the long passes make. Everything that matters happens in about fifteen minutes.
Photography
Michael Blann
Rider
Every SWI is laid up for one rider — their weight, their power, the way they actually ride. One uninterrupted carbon shell, formed in a single mould, built for a body rather than a size chart. It is the whole reason the same mountain feels different underneath two frames.
Michael Blann
For the people who live beneath them the great European ranges are simply a way of life. For everyone else they are scenery. For a cyclist they are none of those things — they are an appointment with your own limits, and the reason a road that goes nowhere useful is worth riding at all.
Michael Blann has spent years photographing the climbs that made the sport: the Alps, the Dolomites, the Pyrenees, the Ardennes. The pictures are landscape photography of a very high order, but the book is really about what those places do to the people who ride them — an argument built from light, weather and altitude, with recollections from professional riders threaded through it.
If you have ever ridden one of these roads, or intend to, it is the closest thing to being back on it.
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